In the air was Hawk’s harsh cry. Hawk folded his wings in the air and was falling. Ground rushing up, with the great kill at its center. Hawk stooped upon it, blinded by the falling wind.
61
Hawk was still falling, but now falling up. Maybe Hawk had become a fish. His wings long fins that stroked the water, fanning him toward the surface. Above was a yellow-green watery light.
Beyond the surface was a cool dim space, like an underwater cave. There were people there waiting, as if in a trance. A woman in a sort of blue jerkin, thick-bodied as a troll. A spidery boy with translucent amber shells that covered his eyes. A slender woman, taller than the first, with loose black hair and a dark, hollow gaze.
The cave covered them like the dome of a tent. They were all looking down, as if waiting for something, or hoping for it. They were looking toward her, but they didn’t see her. She couldn’t break the surface of the water to enter the space where they were. Her hands spread flat on a firm surface, solid though invisible. It wasn’t stone, like the times before. Maybe instead some sort of rock crystal.
In the desert there had been a tent, a silver-gray dome, light as a bubble, and she had looked at it and sensed its reflection, symmetrical beneath the sand, where someone had forgotten to peg it. Two worlds invisible each to the other, invisible but present.
If she pulled back her hand a ghostly image of it remained, like a damp handprint on a pane of glass, fading as it dried. The handprints in the cave were framed in black, and they fit her own hands to perfection. If she kept pressing she could come through, as she had come through the stone before; the stone had softened, like wet clay. She could come out of one cave into the other. That was what the people in the space above her wanted her to do.
That woman, the one of the three she didn’t know, turned toward her. She didn’t move. It was an inward turning. She had been looking down at Julie the whole time, but now she saw her and knew where she was.
She was back to back with herself and facing both the realms at the same time, curving outward into both realms. Below, the First People circled Mammut and cried the joy of the great kill. Above, the other cave, which was a world she also lived in.
But where was she? Behind the moon.
62
“For school,” Carrie Westover said. “I think it was a project for school.” She leaned in the doorway of Julie’s childhood room, wrapped in a pale green quilted robe, her hair still damp from the shower. Through a thin wall, the water heater whined. Marissa sat on the edge of the bed, holding up a fat blue book, a study of prehistoric Clovis people. On the cover, a mastodon labored over a red earth plain. Buried under the dirt, flush with the cover’s lower edge, was a picture of a flaked stone spear point.
“Well, g’night,” Carrie said. Marissa heard her Crocs shuffling into the next room, the whine of bed springs as she settled her weight and kicked off the shoes. The water heater’s shrilling stopped abruptly.
Marissa wanted the room to tell her something. She had stayed there now for several nights. Carrie had invited her, and Marissa was running low on money, though she hadn’t yet run completely out. The first night the loose gutter squealed with the wind, and the next day Marissa went to the hardware store for some roofing nails and tacked it down. She found other small jobs around Carrie’s house and did them, discovering she’d learned more than she thought from weekends volunteering to help Claude with various repairs in the church and crumbling seminary.
Carrie had accepted her, as she seemed to accept everything eventually, like stone receiving water that slowly wears it down. The massages also helped. Marissa had brought Carrie back from the edge of plantar fasciitis, she was reasonably sure. Carrie said it was much easier now, to walk through her shift. They were hiring at Walmart, Carrie said, but that was Marissa’s idea of hell. She’d sooner waitress at the Magic Carpet, not that there was a place for her there. Grind cloves and chop up garlic in the kitchen. The town was far too small to support a masseuse, and anyway people in a place like this would probably think that “massage” was code for “prostitution.” But she was sure she could find nursing work somewhere reasonably nearby, when it got to the point she absolutely had to.
The Clovis book was densely academic; Marissa couldn’t get through a page of it without going to sleep. She’d read the same paragraph over and over, mind wandering away from the text. Strange choice for a high school girl. The book didn’t look much used, and maybe Julie had just been captivated by the cover and bought it by mistake. On the bookshelf opposite the bed, fringed with an array of tiny plastic dinosaurs, were more accessible books about Indians and early man. Marissa crossed the room and took down a copy of Black Elk Speaks, opened it, closed it, put it back in its place.
In a desk drawer, Marissa had found a modest collection of arrowheads, but Carrie didn’t know if Julie had found them one by one or bought the lot. She didn’t seem to have known they were there. What did Carrie know about Julie? She did well in school, with little prompting, but not so well that anyone would denounce her as a brain. She was pretty enough, but not enough to make a mother worry. Carrie had raised her as a single mother, from the time Julie was two. The marriage had dissolved so soon after the adoption that Julie would have no memory of the man who had briefly posed as her father, who’d stopped sending child support when she was ten and whose whereabouts, since then, had been unknown.
Marissa might have done the same, she thought. If a butterfly waggled its wings in Cambodia, say, instead of in China. The idea didn’t stab her, as it had at first. When she had wept among the scattered stones of Pine Ridge, somewhere even GPS couldn’t find her. No it was a duller pain. She thought of Carrie’s mute ability to spread shocks all over the surface of her being; that way they didn’t knock her down.
There was an infinity of possible lives, and after all she only had this one, but what if all the lives were somehow happening anyway, all at once? There was the Julie who lay unresponsive in this coma that wasn’t really a coma, like Sleeping Beauty waiting for a kiss, and the other Julie Marissa seemed to have seen floating up toward her like a revenant from underwater, her eyes open with some kind of recognition, her mouth about to open with a greeting, her hands flattening, palms out, on the invisible barrier between them.
She thought for a moment of trying an Exercise, sitting cross-legged on the floor, but instead she worked her shoes off with her toes and stretched out on the narrow bed, still with her clothes on. Julie’s pillowcase was printed with little emerald paisley shapes. Marissa reached up and across herself to turn out the lamp. On the ceiling above the fluorescent green stars lit up. They seemed to have been arranged in constellations, only not the real ones in the real sky. There was a pattern that suggested a fish and another that suggested a bird. Julie must have done it herself. Carrie wasn’t the sort to imagine it, and wouldn’t have time to carry it out.
But then the stars were white, not green, and there was a whole great dome of them, the Milky Way spread out across the velvet darkness. Firelight on the plain below, and near-naked people dancing with a curious sort of stutter step around a skeleton, or rather a carcass; blood was still red on the vast ribcage, which was big enough for her to stand inside. She was watching them and also dancing among them, and with that queer lucidity also aware that this dream might have been inflated out of the books in Julie’s room so maybe that was why Julie was dreaming it. That wouldn’t explain why she herself was. A hollow sound built from a long way off, like wind in a cannon barrel that would reach to the moon and the mastodon assembled its bones and tusks and rose, turning to face her, one single white-blazing eye burning toward her in the middle of its forehead. The hollow sound became a roar and the floor was shaking under the bedposts and Marissa shot upright as the headlight strummed across Julie’s window and the train went tearing by.
It seemed to be a very long train, and it left a big hole in the air behind it. By time the sound of it had receded, Marissa had managed to stop
shaking. Usually when you just went to sleep, Carrie had told her—that was when the train came by. It was the first one that Marissa had heard. Carrie was inured to it; Marissa could hear the rasp of her sleeping breath, not quite a snore, through the wall behind Julie’s bed.
Carrying her shoes in one hand, she slipped out the kitchen door. When she stepped from under the carport she was bathed in starlight. No moon. She walked to the edge of dead-end pavement and looked west. The iron rails caught a glimmer of starlight, as if the passing wheels had burnished them. There was no light pollution in this place; when she craned her neck she could see all the stars.
When she turned back toward the dark house she thought for some reason of that pack of cigarettes she’d bought, the day Claude died, and wondered if they might still be in her glove box, though she was pretty sure she’d thrown them out. Anyway they’d be stale by now. She didn’t know why she would want one. Then she saw that her truck was completely gone.
63
In the rear of The Magic Carpet, Jamal stood at the utility sink, draining chickpeas. The water was still hot, and slightly steaming. He shook the colander, poured the peas into a big flat baking dish. The restaurant had been closed for an hour, and his mother had gone to bed, and this was the last chore of the night. He measured in tahini, lemon juice and a little minced garlic, picked up a potato masher and began to crush it all together.
When he looked up he could see his own reflection in the black pane of the kitchen window, and when he looked a second time he became aware of another pair of eyes, inside the mirror image of his own, looking in on him from the outside. He didn’t change the pace of his movements. He covered the dish with plastic wrap and put it in the refrigerator, then got out a clump of parsley and dropped it on a cutting board. But really the parsley would be better if he chopped it the next day. He put it back in the refrigerator and flicked off the light, resisting the impulse to look at the window again, though he knew that if he did, now he would be able to see whoever was outside.
Instead he went out the back door of the restaurant and turned the corner of the building. Ultimo had moved away from the kitchen window and stood at the far end of the parking lot, looking at Jamal as if he had known exactly where Jamal would appear. There was no menace in the look, or even any curiosity. It was just looking. Jamal remained, his right hand resting lightly on the edge of the building’s painted cinderblock corner. After a little while Ultimo got into his vehicle and began to drive away.
Jamal threw a leg over the saddle of his scooter and followed. Or not exactly; he didn’t keep Ultimo in sight, because he didn’t want Ultimo to notice him. But at the edge of town he picked up the taillights where he’d expected them to be. There was no doubt; Ultimo’s taillights were set much farther apart than any other car in the area.
He kept well back. On a rise of the highway above the phony ghost town he saw Ultimo’s tail lights turning in beside the tilted stagecoach. Jamal stopped on the shoulder, waited five minutes. A highway patrol car went by, headed toward town; it slowed as it passed him, but didn’t stop.
When he left the road he shut off the headlight of his bike. No moon, but there were stars aplenty to illuminate the rocks and scrub. Wide-set tire tracks wound between the boulders and mesquite, climbing the slope of a low ridge. Just short of the crest he killed his motor and rolled the bike into the shadow of a rock.
He heard barking, a rattle of chain, then the thunk of a heavy car door slamming shut. When the barking subsided he could hear coyotes singing in the far distance. Now and then a car hissed down the highway behind him, obscured for a moment by the ramshackle rooflines of the Wild West Town, then reappearing.
Jamal walked to the top of the ridge and saw a double-wide trailer, Ultimo’s it must be, caged by a wide square of chain-link fence. Inside the trailer was just a flicker of turquoise light from a TV. Jamal moved toward it, setting his sneakers down quietly on the rutted track. The wind was in his face, so the dogs didn’t pick him up till he was quite near. When the dogs began barking and hurling themselves against the fence, he stopped and crouched on his heels, watching from the shadow of the ridge above and behind him.
No sign of anything inside the trailer except flashes of light from the TV. Ultimo could be anywhere, in the trailer or in the cage. He drove a Humvee—not the commercial kind sold to civilians, but the original military vehicle. No one knew how he had come by it. The body was dented and punctured here and there with what might have been shrapnel, and the passenger window was gone, replaced with plastic duct-taped to the frame. Ultimo had parked the vehicle inside the wire, just on the other side of a double set of gates, locked shut with a heavy chain.
Jamal stood up and walked toward the fence. The dogs went even crazier as he moved toward them. The fence was serious business: eight feet high, posts set in concrete, a coil of razor ribbon strung along the top; it probably cost more than the whole trailer. There was another, smaller gate, opposite the door of the trailer, this one secured with a padlock through the hasp of its catch. Jamal stood in front of this gate, looking toward the closed door beyond it.
The dogs were fighters, bred and trained for the pit. There were five of them, raging and throwing themselves into the chain link, bashing their muzzles into the gate posts. The biggest had Catahula Leopard stripes, and even he wasn’t tremendously big—not as high as Jamal’s hip. Jamal thought he liked that one the best. Smooth muscle working under the stripe pattern in the starlight, the hot yellow eyes, the singleness of intention as he kept trying to rush the gate, as if he didn’t believe in any barrier between himself and the blood inside Jamal’s body.
But finally the big Catahula gave up. He stood a few feet back from the gate, vibrating still with a low growl, hackles pricked up between his hunched shoulders. The other dogs had given up before him. A couple of them went off and curled up under the hammered fender of the Humvee.
Jamal watched the aluminum door of the trailer. There was a window in it, but it was dark and the balance of light was in favor of the person inside. Now that the dogs were quiet Jamal could hear the voices from the television. Fox News.
He somehow doubted that Ultimo was actually watching that. Ultimo could be standing inside with his nose touching a window and Jamal still wouldn’t be able to see him through the starlight reflecting off the pane.
The big Catahula stopped growling and settled down at the trailer’s door sill. He was still watching Jamal intently, the yellow eyes glowing like agate. Jamal listened to the trailer, hard, but there was nothing he could hear but the chatter of the television. The dogs didn’t bark when he turned away and started walking back up the ridge, but in the distant desert the high, eerie wail of the coyotes started up again.
64
A car was idling on the shoulder of the highway when Jamal got back to his bike. A maroon Trans Am—he didn’t recognize it. It took off toward town the moment he lit it up with his single headlight, its rear wheels spitting gravel back against the dry-rotted boards of the fake stagecoach.
Jamal rode slowly back to town. The stars were so bright he would have liked to shut off his headlight again, but he didn’t want to risk a ticket on the highway.
Two blocks from the Magic Carpet he saw Marissa’s truck pulled to the curb, motor running though the lights were out. He put a foot on the asphalt and throttled down. It was odd for Marissa to be out so late, and anyway he wasn’t sure that he wanted to talk to her now. The excursion to Ultimo’s had meant something but he didn’t quite know what and he didn’t have a way to tell about it either. Maybe he could make something up. He was thinking that when he realized that the silhouette behind the wheel of the truck, backlit by a streetlight, had ears. Marissa’s hair was long enough that her ears didn’t show.
The lights of the truck came blazing on; it lunged at him with a rubber squeal. Jamal froze for a second, almost too long, then twisted the throttle and popped the bike onto the sidewalk. The truck swerved after him, viciously, bu
t caromed off the posts of the parking meters between the street and the brick storefronts, spun out into the street and died.
Jamal could see Marko’s knotted face as he struggled to open the dented driver’s door. White teeth. The door wouldn’t open. Marko threw himself out the passenger door and stalked away without looking back.
“The train woke me up,” Marissa said. “They stole my truck.”
Jamal, still astraddle the bike, was looking at his hands and his feet, as if surprised they were still whole. The motor sputtered and died under him. He knocked down the kickstand and got off, steadying himself with one hand on the parking meter.
“I can see that,” he said.
“See what?”
“Marko stole your truck.”
Marissa dropped an arm over his shoulders and Jamal wrapped his around her waist. They balanced for a moment that way, leaning into each other, hip to hip.
“He tried to kill you.”
Jamal, without saying anything, shrugged off her arm. Marissa shivered, from shock or the cold. The night was chilly, and she’d left Carrie’s house without a jacket. She walked to the truck and pulled at the driver’s door. It wouldn’t open.
“Let me do that.” A strange voice, with a shade of the accent Jamal didn’t have. Marissa stepped back. Two men were standing by the truck-bed, looking at her alertly. One pulled a short crowbar from under his loose shirt-tail and began to work it around the dented edges of the door.
Behind the Moon Page 14